And then there’s Scotland. Trump has long sought Alban affection, only to be met—in large part—with a Caledonian cold shoulder. From the Borders to the Hebrides, Trump has sought to emphasize his ties with Scotland; in return, he’s earned loathing in Midlothian and antipathy in Ayrshire. The latest blow came this week, when the U.K. Supreme Court rejected his efforts to block the installation of wind turbines off the coast of Aberdeen, which Trump argued would sully Scotland’s pristine beauty—and the view from his golf development.

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Mary Anne MacLeod was born in Tong, a tiny village (2001 population: 527) on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, off Scotland’s West Coast. Her parents spoke Gaelic; the remote town offered a hardscrabble life. In 1930, she left for New York, where she met and married Fred Trump, a successful real-estate developer. In 2008, Donald Trump visited Lewis for the first time in decades, stopping by the cottage where his mother was born (for 97 seconds, according to The Guardian’s count).

“I feel very comfortable here,” he said. “It’s interesting when your mother, who was such a terrific woman, comes from a specific location, you tend to like that location. I think I do feel Scottish.”

Trump had an ulterior motive for these warm words. He was en route to Aberdeen, on the east coast, where he was seeking approval to develop a huge golf course. “I think this land is special, I think Scotland is special, and I wanted to do something special for my mother,” he said.

Trump had bought a portion of the Menie Estate in Aberdeenshire two years earlier with the intention of building a golf course and resort there. But the area included sand dunes that were a protected site. He was eventually able to win approval—over the reservations of local residents and government—and construct the course. Ultimately, Scottish officials decided the economic benefit outweighed the environmental degradation. That didn’t stop Trump from whining throughout the process that the government was going hard on him despite his plans to invest vast amounts of money in the country. “If somebody else had applied, they would have gotten it a lot easier than me,” he said. “The celebrity and all of this media and craziness is probably a liability for me. But it’s an asset for the area and for Scotland. Everybody is talking about this course all over the world.”

The course opened in 2012; it is, according to its website, “the world’s greatest golf course.” But Trump’s approach had sowed animosity among locals. As The Scotsman noted, “People didn’t take kindly to a billionaire American jetting in to a rural corner of Scotland, making disparaging remarks about a collection of buildings on a hillside that didn’t fit with his idea of an upmarket golf resort.” A critically acclaimed documentary, You’ve Been Trumped, told the story of how he’d managed to railroad through the course.

Almost immediately, Trump was engaged in a fight over the wind farm. In 2012, he fired off a characteristically Trumpian letter to First Minister Alex Salmond, the head of the Scottish government. “With the reckless installation of these monsters, you will single-handedly have done more damage to Scotland than virtually any event in Scottish history,” he thundered. “As a matter of fact, I have just authorized my staff to allocate a substantial amount of money to launch an international campaign to fight your plan to surround Scotland’s coast with many thousands of wind turbines.”

With typical humility, he told Salmond, “Please understand that I am doing this to save Scotland.”

“I think this land is special, I think Scotland is special, and I wanted to do something special for my mother.”

That was, one might say, a wee bit daft. “It’s hard to think of a less sympathetic character in the eyes of most Scots. Despite all his tartanry and trumpeting of heritage, The Donald is almost the anti-Scot personified,” wrote Lesley Riddoch. “Left and right, unionist and nationalist, man and woman, young and old—it takes quite a lot to unite the people of this notoriously fractious little country in a collective shudder.”

The fight soon turned even nastier. It emerged that a Salmond aide had written to Trump in 2009, asking the businessman to back the release from prison, on compassionate grounds, of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing over Scotland. The release was not popular in Scotland or the United Kingdom. Trump’s son Donald Jr. gleefully blasted Salmond, claiming that the first minister was backing the wind farm as retribution for Trump declining the request.

“He asked us to support his decision to release a terrorist that killed hundreds of people. Ever since we refused to do that, he has been a total enemy of ours,” Donald Jr. told The Scotsman. “From that point on, all of the promises that we were made about the [wind farm] application changed drastically.”

But Trump’s gnashing of teeth about the supposed environmental damage from the wind farm rang rather hollow, given that his resort had been built on theretofore-protected dunes. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that the 6,000 jobs he’d promised as part of the project weren’t about to materialize—there were just 200 by the summer of 2013.

Having lost the fight over the wind farm at a lower level, Trump announced in February 2014 he was taking his toys and going—well, not home, but to Ireland. But he also said he would appeal the wind-farm decision. In the meantime, he vowed to keep the Aberdeen course open, even as he halted plans for a second course on the site. “We have a spectacular piece of land for the second course and we look forward to getting on with the project,” he said, “but I can’t do that in all good conscience when the threat of very ugly industrial turbines looms over Aberdeen.”

Two months later, however, Trump bought Turnberry, a golf resort in Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland. And in July, he insisted that he liked Alex Salmond. He declined to take a stand on a referendum on Scottish independence—Salmond’s life’s work—saying the outcome would have no impact on his development plans. Yet when the referendum failed in the fall, Trump wasted no time stabbing Salmond in the back. “Had he not littered Scotland with these horrible wind turbines, which have raised everybody’s taxes … I think he would have done much better,” Trump told Fortune. But he also added, “Scotland is the most magnificent land there is.”

Then came Trump’s presidential campaign, and its long string of variously outlandish statements. There was the honorary degree taken away, along with the business ambassadorship. Hundreds of thousands of Britons signed a petition calling for Trump to be barred from the U.K. Golf officials reportedly decided not to play the 2020 British Open at Turnberry. Trump lashed out, feelings hurt and feeling unappreciated.

“I have done so much for Scotland, including building Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, which has received the highest accolades, and is what many believe to be one of the greatest golf courses anywhere in the world,” he wrote in an op-ed. “The UK politicians should be thanking me instead of pandering to political correctness.”

And then, finally, came the repudiation at the U.K. Supreme Court. Trump has again vowed to appeal to a European court, but the odds of a victory are vanishing toward nothing. Salmond, who resigned his leadership of the Scottish National Party and the first ministership after Scotland’s independence referendum, got a chance for sweet revenge, branding Trump “three times a loser.”

“Despite all his tartanry and trumpeting of heritage, The Donald is almost the anti-Scot personified.”

What went wrong in Trump’s relationship with his mother’s homeland? The Donald has built his incredible rise in U.S politics by courting a political constituency that feels ignored by politicians. In Scotland, acting as a businessman, he adopted a much more traditional approach: He assiduously worked to win over powerful national leaders, whether in the Labour Party or the Scottish National Party. That worked for a while—for example, it helped him overcome the resistance of local Aberdeenshire officials to his golf development. In the long run, however, his act wore thin. His bombast alienated Salmond and other government officials, and it never won over many ordinary Scots.

Trump seems to have believed that his nostalgia for his mother’s homeland—newly felt when he needed approval for his golf courses—would win over Scottish hearts. “I don’t feel like an interloper,” he once said. “I don’t feel that people see me as an outsider.” He seems to have been wrong. Scots aren’t in desperate need of another rich American with a seemingly superficial desire to connect with his roots. Such Americans are easy to find—scarfing haggis, neeps, and tatties on the Royal Mile, or standing on a street corner in St. Andrews, sporting ill-fitting tartan golf gear. Trump may have been wealthier than the rest, but he was also louder, ruder, and less endearing.

It’s a painful reality for a man who says he just wanted to honor his mother, for which there might be no better remedy than a few drams of a fine single malt. Alas, Trump is a teetotaler.

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.